Hugo Chavez

by Cristina Marcano

  The afternoon of April 13 was a shipwreck for the conspirators. Carmona attempted to save face and revoked the decision to dissolve the National Assembly. But progovernment leaders had already begun to congregate out on the streets, calling for people to join in. The armed forces had regrouped, and the coup leaders were now a minority whose endeavor had failed. In one last attempt to elicit his resignation, Chávez’s captors took him to La Orchila. In a private biplane, Cardinal Ignacio Velasco and Colonel Julio Rodríguez joined him on the island. The book El acertijo de abril describes it as “an eleventh-hour effort that attempted to stave off the imminent fall of the transitional government. The High Military Command had accepted his request to leave the country, but Chávez changed his argument. Now he was thinking about his resignation. Chávez began to draft a document in which he committed to dismissing his vice president, Diosdado Cabello, and he agreed to sign the document once it had been transcribed onto a computer. But he never had time to do it.”22

  As more and more people filled the streets in protest and the criticism of the new regime grew louder and louder, the private television stations kept busy by trying to hide what was going on, abruptly canceling their news shows and occupying their screens with children’s cartoons or foreign films. At this point, however, there was no way to stop the process that was now under way. At 10 P.M., Pedro Carmona tendered his resignation and relinquished the presidency of the Republic. Just before midnight, General Baduel dispatched three helicopters to La Orchila to bring the president back.

  Exactly what Hugo Chávez and Ignacio Velasco discussed that night at the water’s edge remains a mystery. The death of the archbishop, who succumbed to cancer in June 2003, adds another patch of darkness to this historic moment. There they were: one of the conspiracy’s most crucial political operators, a man of the cloth who believed that the “Bolivarian” president was trying to impose a kind of “Castrocommunism” in Venezuela, and his victim—a victim who would no longer be a victim in a few short hours. What did they say to each other? What did they talk about? According to Velasco, Chávez mulled over a lot of things and asked to be forgiven for his mistakes. The president confirmed this version of the story but on another occasion claimed that he had harshly rebuked the priest for his direct participation in the coup and for the Church’s unwarranted involvement in the political conspiracy. Velasco’s signature appeared, along with several others, in support of the Carmona government’s constitution. Some time later, the cardinal stated that he had not known what it was about and that he had signed a blank sheet of paper. Anyone familiar with the maze of characters and anecdotes behind the events of April 11 might find new significance in Hugo Chávez’s first words that early morning when he addressed the nation after being reinstated as president: “To God what belongs to God, to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to the people what belongs to the people.”

  Once order was restored, Chávez acknowledged his mistakes, admitted the need for a national dialogue, and took measures such as changing the members of his cabinet and starting a new negotiation process with the executive board of PDVSA to demonstrate an intention to rectify his ways. He also assured the nation that there would be no political or personal interference when it came time to judge the facts. And although the Supreme Court of Justice accepted the claim of the “power vacuum” and ruled in favor of the military officers who had tried to overthrow Chávez, the events of April 11 were not so quickly forgotten. Two years later, the justice system went after the generals who had supposedly “betrayed” Chávez. In 2004, the attorney general’s office also opened an investigation to press charges against all those who had signed the Act of Constitution of Pedro Carmona’s short-lived government.

  In the end, the coup attempt actually strengthened the government and gave it new motivation, new drive, greater international legitimacy, and a political argument with which to discredit the opposition, by accusing them of plotting coups and using violent methods to seize power. It also served to good advantage inside governmental institutions. As Maripili Hernández points out, “April 11 did us a great favor because it forced a necessary purge that got rid of the traitors.” After lengthy question-and-answer sessions in the National Assembly, the Supreme Court of Justice ruled in favor of the power vacuum theory. This, however, in no way hampered the major purge that took place later on inside the armed forces. In the civilian realm, some of the people who had participated in the coup fled the country. Pedro Carmona, who spent a few days under house arrest, left Venezuela in May and sought asylum in Colombia, where he presently lives. When Monsignor Velasco died a year later, the government announced a three-day mourning period, but during the funeral near the Caracas cathedral, a group of Chávez sympathizers celebrated his death.

  The country may have made it past the military and political crises of those dark days, but the subject of human rights, deaths, and abuses—both on April 11, and afterward under Carmona’s fleeting government—remains an open wound for the Venezuelan people. Néstor Francia believes that “one of the most remarkable aspects of the April 11 coup was the massive manipulation that took place afterward, orchestrated by the major media organizations and aimed at distorting the facts, blocking the quest for truth, and condemning sectors of society without [the benefit of ] any serious or credible investigation.”23 Most especially, he is referring to the video that showed members of the progovernment party firing guns from a bridge. In addition to this videotape, which traveled the globe, other videos and photographs have also surfaced, with images of Metropolitan Police agents, who reported to the opposition mayor Alfredo Peña, firing away as well.

  Though all the versions of what happened that day seem to accept the hypothesis that there were indeed sharpshooters positioned on the top floors of certain buildings, the opinions diverge when it comes time to lay blame, and both sides accuse each other of having been responsible for the sharpshooters. More than one analyst has also found it strange that the administration—one with a majority in the National Assembly, to boot—would block the creation of a neutral Truth Commission with international representation that would have investigated the events of April 11 and shed real light on the issue. General Raúl Salazar, Chávez’s first minister of defense and later on his ambassador in Spain, resigned from his job over this, and stated, “The Commission was not allowed to function because a number of truths were coming out that would lead to the indictment of people in the government.”

  Perhaps, for a large part of the population, the most tragic thing of all is that both sides may be right, that when both sides accuse each other, neither is lying. That the inexplicable violence and deaths of those days are dangerously interwoven between the two groups. Perhaps the saddest thing of all is that in the end, neither side wants the truth to come out.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Showman of Miraflores

  “CHÁVEZ DEFINITELY PICKED THE WRONG PROFESSION. HE WOULD have been a first-rate performer. Here in the world of television, movies, there’s nobody like him.” This is the opinion of Alberto Müller Rojas, his chief campaign coordinator for the 1998 elections. Many people would agree. Allies and adversaries, observers, simple witnesses—nobody can deny Hugo Chávez’s communicative talents. The trust and affection he is able to inspire in people never cease to amaze. It is by far his greatest asset as a politician. In fact, the failed insurrection of February 4, 1992, was essentially a media coup. That day, Chávez failed in his military endeavor, but in terms of audience it was his first great triumph. It was his first encounter with the god of television ratings.

  At first glance, there isn’t very much in his personal history to suggest that this skill would eventually become one of his great assets. At the military academy he enjoyed public speaking, organized cultural events, and participated in plays. When the military assigned him to the town of Elorza, he became a kind of cultural and athletic promoter, an emcee at the town’s festivals. These anecdotes, however, seem a rather faint foreshadowi
ng of the tremendous media power that he would come to wield. In fact, many friends from his earlier years remember him for being somewhat withdrawn. According to them he was almost shy, something that is all but impossible to imagine now.

  Hugo Chávez is the first Venezuelan president born in the age of television. One of his childhood friends recalls with absolute clarity the moment that television came into their lives; “The first television in Sabaneta belonged to Francisco Contreras, who was the father of one of the most prosperous families in town, earned with a lot of honest work. That was in 1964.” At that time, little Hugo was around nine or ten. Efrén Jiménez, another friend from these days, describes their experience of the projected image: “The only entertainment we had was the movies, which cost one real. What did we see? Mexican movies and, every so often, westerns.”

  The Venezuela of those days was another country entirely. Chávez belongs to what is probably the first generation of Venezuelans who have grown up with and feel connected to the media, the industry of the masses. His confession to the Chilean magazine Qué Pasa in 1999 underscores this: “Instead of Superman, my hero was Bolívar.”1 The point of comparison here was a comic strip character who, when Chávez was a child, was featured in a television series as a slightly pudgy black-and-white superhero whose claim to fame was entirely dependent on some very rudimentary special effects.

  Yet, while the media certainly existed as a circumstance in people’s lives, at the very least as a harbinger of things to come, Chávez did not seem very interested in procuring a connection to that world, neither as a boy nor as a teenager. The remotest instance of any kind of nascent showmanship dates back to his school days, to a ceremony in honor of the first bishop of Barinas, Monsignor Rafael Angel González.

  “I was in sixth grade, and they called on me to say a few things using a little microphone,” Chávez recalls.2 And although later on he was always willing to spice up parties and read and sing in public, nobody remembers him especially as a showman in the making. If anything, he was far more entranced by the dream of becoming a professional baseball player than of honing his communications skills as an announcer or emcee. One classmate from secondary school says that “Hugo was always very theatrical, very humorous, affectionate, and talking came very easily to him,” but she also recalls that among his fellow students “he was absolutely anonymous.” The Ruiz brothers and Jesús Pérez, Chávez’s friends during those years, also recall his dramatic streak, his good humor, and his aplomb. Without a doubt, these characteristics would come together with a vengeance on February 4, 1992, as he entered the annals of history with those two words—“for now”—which quickly became a national motto.

  Chávez’s first television appearance was not a starring role but rather that of an extra, one of many soldiers who participated in the inaugural parade of the newly elected president of Venezuela in 1974. For the young Hugo Chávez, however, the moment was terribly meaningful. On March 13, he wrote in his diary, “At night, after turning out the lights, I went to watch the parade on TV and studied very closely how I walked past the stage. Did they see me at home?”3 Years later, in the city of Maracaibo, a rather unusual occurrence took place during one of the marathon Saturday variety shows. Part of the show included a beauty pageant that at the very end featured a paratrooper who swooped down from the sky and handed a flower to the winner. Gilberto Correa was the emcee of the show, and years later Hugo Chávez would be the one to remind Correa that he had been the soldier who descended from the heavens to greet the newly crowned beauty queen. The announcement left more than a few people stunned that this man, someone capable of conspiring to overthrow the government, who had read Marx and idolized Che Guevara, had also been willing to lend himself out to one of the most classic productions of Latin American commercial television.

  Beyond personal desires, however, Hugo Chávez has had no choice but to think seriously about the power of the media. He has lived with them at very close range and knows their intricacies well. In a personal, immediate sense, he is intimately familiar with the dazzling effects of media attention. Before February 4, being promoted to general was about as far as Hugo Chávez could expect to go in life. Right after the failed coup, he could easily have been handed a lengthy prison sentence or forbidden from entering politics for the rest of his life. A number of factors, however, interceded on Chávez’s behalf, and the magical enchantment of the media was one of them. The military officer who appeared on television, assuming the responsibility for the coup and its failure, occupied the space of a performance that many Venezuelans had long been anticipating. Suddenly, there he was, the perfect incarnation of antipolitics, the face that perhaps represented the sentiments of a great majority of Venezuelans who were desperate and fed up with an elite that was no longer capable of understanding what was going on in the country.

  At carnival time in February 1992, little children dressed up as Chávez strolled through the parks. Along with Zorro and all the other typical superheroes, a new kind of outfit found its way into the context of children’s costumes that year: the field uniform of the military officer and the red beret of the paratrooper. Chávez’s arrival on the scene on February 4 marked a sea change. That was when he began to tease out his real temperament and character. The journalist and former guerrilla Angela Zago, who wrote the first apologia for the 4F conspirators4 and now opposes Chávez, remembers the early days: “When I went to the jail, I didn’t go to meet Hugo Chávez, I went to meet all of them. But who was the most talkative, the most spontaneous, the nicest one of all? Chávez. I remember how he walked into the room where we were all waiting, and from far away—that’s how good he is—he said to me, ‘What an honor! I can’t believe it!’ He came over to me and said, ‘It is such an honor for me to meet you, I have read you all my life,’ and I don’t know how many other things.” Clearly, Chávez is a fast learner. He knows how to flatter his interlocutors, how to court them, how to make them feel close to him. At that very same prison, as representatives of different sectors of civil society began to visit the conspirators, Chávez began to hone what would become an extraordinary talent for seducing anyone he so desired. It was around this time, too, that he began to forge a personal relationship with the news media.

  This process created some friction within the group. Jesús Urdaneta explains this with a story from those days behind bars at the San Carlos barracks: “We had a public telephone that was ours for two hours, and we would generally use it to call our wives and kids. Chávez, though, used it to make statements to the press for half an hour, an hour. After a while they took the phone away from us, and I had it out with him. ‘Great, now they’ve taken the phone away from us, all because of you and your needs,’ I said to him. He already had plans of his own. I didn’t. I was thinking about my family.” Soon enough, this dynamic began to weaken the group, and Chávez grew stronger and stronger on his own, coming off as the absolute symbol of the movement. Beyond the typical arguments and internal debates that would naturally have erupted among the conspirators, an external factor had suddenly come between them, and it would be a decisive factor in the days and years to come: the popularity of Hugo Chávez.

  The media frenzy generated by his release from jail was so great that he would not relive anything like it until 1998, when he threw his hat into the ring and ran for president. There were times when Chávez would lash out at the media, claiming that they were running a censorship campaign against him. William Izarra, who was working with Chávez at the time, acknowledges that in those days, “almost all the national media outlets attacked us and refused to give us any space.”5 On one hand, the media may not have been very interested in promoting him, but on the other hand, his popularity did take a dip as he refused to abandon his radical discourse against democracy and the electoral process. The essential change occurred in 1998. From this moment on, his relationship with the media would remain forever fluid and ever more intense. Sometimes they were in agreement, other times at logger
heads, but from this point on there was always some sort of relationship between them.

  “HE CAN MAKE YOU cry just by looking at you.” These are the sentiments of Maripili Hernández. Beyond whatever devotion she might feel for her leader, her comment reveals an important communicative trait: Chávez is a natural on television. He is friendly and amusing and inspires sympathy with ease. His brand of charisma is highly valued within the advertising and entertainment industry. It produces fervor, loyalty.

  These emotions were reflected in the polls in 1998 as Chávez gathered more and more support, especially from the media. The most enthusiastic news source of them all was El Nacional, one of Venezuela’s principal newspapers, and the Diego Cisneros Organization, owner of television’s Channel Four. With the exception of a few isolated cases, all the media were on Chávez’s side. The former army officer had clearly touched a chord with the media, which despised the country’s traditional political parties and supported an antipolitical stance. In early 1999, when Chávez took office, his effervescent media presence was at an all-time high, and his administration reveled in its honeymoon with the press. The country was brimming over with giddy enthusiasm. Hope was in style again.

  Winning an election, of course, is a lot easier than governing a country. It was not long before the relationship between Chávez and the media cooled off. Chávez, it turned out, was particularly sensitive to certain information the press brought to light and worked quickly to promote the creation of alternative media outlets and programs, of which he was the central focus and the guiding force. Thanks to these initiatives, he could personally offer his version of what was going on in the country. This was also the genesis of a project entitled El Correo del Presidente, an official newspaper aimed at reaching as broad an audience as possible. According to Humberto Jaimes, the newspaper’s information director, the state has the right “to disseminate the information it deems strategic and important for public opinion; it has the right to publish its own version, just like any commercial media outlet does.”6